Hi all! I believe one of the biggest challenges people encounter when learning Japanese grammar, is trying to describe their grammar in terms of English grammar. This leads to a lot of confusion, given that it can be argued that Japanese doesn’t even have “true” adjectives (someone would argue it instead has descriptive verbs [い adjectives] and descriptive nouns [な adjectives], along with many other related discussions (Does Japanese truly have subjects? Desu/Da isn’t a verb, but a copula. Etc).

Every resource I have seen - including the beloved Genki - will just describe it terms of English and arbitrary rules, or will be written in such a technical manner that I feel like I’d need PhD in Linguistics to grok it at all. The one exception I’ve seen is this amazing article: https://kimallen.sheepdogdesign.net/Japanese/

A secondary goal would be a greater understanding of phonemes so I can wrap my mind around the subtle pronunciation limitations of the Heburn system (such as tsu and ru being rough approximations). As language shadowing is probably a better way to nail this, I’m making it a secondary goal.

At any rate, I think I might have more luck if I learn a bit about linguistics, so I can describe things in linguistic terms instead of English terms; it will also hopefully make some of those denser articles more accessible. That being said, I don’t want to get too distracted by this rabbit hole, as learning Japanese is my primary goal. Do any of you know of a good book, course, or online course that would assist with this? I’ve been working my though “English Grammar for Students of Japanese” http://www.oliviahill.com/student/japanese/ and it’s been a big help, but I’m looking to go a little more in-depth.

Also, as I imagine someone will address this - I get that I’m probably going into the nitty-gritty a bit too much, and a lot of this will just come through exposure. Part of my motivation in learning Japanese is that I find it fascinating that a language can have such a different set of linguistic primitives than English; this sort of stuff is a lot of fun to me, even if it isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to reach fluency Thanks all!

The third edition of this established textbook has been thoroughly updated and revised. It maintains its broad coverage of topics from phonetics to language variation, and increases its accessibility ...

I bought it from my University bookshop while I was studying engineering. Since we’re based in Australia, we actually had quite a decent Japanese program, so if it was at the bookshop, it counts as some kind of endorsement, I guess. It’s an introductory level college textbook, so it’s at that price point/level?